Almost four years after John and Lara Alexiou moved their yoga studio from the East Mountain to downtown Scranton, they have doubled the number of offered classes, tripled their staff and expanded their membership fivefold.

Some of their customers now live so close, they can ride the elevator to class. In Steamtown Hot Yoga’s short time downtown, new businesses have opened and more housing has become available.

The Electric City’s downtown has come far since the 1970s and 1980s, seeing an intense revitalization in recent years. Scranton has followed the recipe for reviving its city center, but it’s obvious to most: It can still add more to improve its own version.

A healthy mix of housing, offices, restaurants and retail will attract a lot of different people downtown “to keep that blood flow through the city’s heart,” said Meghan Ashlin Rich, Ph.D., an associate professor of sociology at the University of Scranton who studies urban neighborhoods. She splits her time between Scranton and her hometown of Baltimore, another urban center that resuscitated itself.

A downtown that relies on just one thing, like restaurants or retail, means people will come for that one thing, then leave.

Folding office space into the mix enhances the customer base for downtown businesses, but cities also need apartments and condos.

A variety of options make a place more attractive to live, so the ingredients of housing and retail enhance the potency of each other.

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Scranton has come far since Rich first came to the city in 2006. Most manufacturing and industry in the city was long gone, but remnants of the accompanying red-light district on Lackawanna Avenue — like pool halls — still remained, she said.

Renovated apartment buildings have opened to fill that need, bringing large groups of people to shop and dine at the many establishments that have opened downtown — places like Ale Mary’s bar and restaurant and the well-known Moosic restaurant AV, which is renovating a building downtown for its new location. The Marketplace at Steamtown

, once an engine for revitalization before its decline, is trying to reinvent itself to reclaim that gravitational pull to attract shoppers and tenants. It has had some success in luring large employers like Luzerne County Community College and popular food sellers like the Old Forge pizza restaurant Revello's.

But rather than tweaking the city to fit the recipe for a successful downtown, Scranton should do the opposite, many say.

“There’s not one-size-fits-all, because every city is a little bit different, and we have to revitalize in a way that is true to who we are as a city,” said , director of community and government relations at the University of Scranton, which serves as a bridge between students and the community, including downtown businesses. “Scranton has a lot of wonderful things going for it in terms of its history and its culture. We’re becoming a more diverse city. We want to be able to grow in a way that’s sensitive to the history of the city, including architecture.”The Lackawanna Heritage Valley, a local organization that works to preserve the region’s history, has made dramatic improvements in Lackawanna County and Scranton, including the construction of a popular biking and hiking trail that connects the county through the city’s downtown.

The city has been successful in maximizing strengths, using what Rich calls “a really cool thing about Scranton.”

“It still has these old buildings — they didn’t knock them all down,” she said. “You can use this really beautiful architecture and give people more options as far as living.”

With all the improvement seen in the downtown, we are close to getting to that winning combination of different things, Schumacher Cohen said.

Still needed

The biggest need downtown is for a grocery store, though it’s unclear if enough people live there to support one, said Alexiou, who lives with his wife in their condo on Lackawanna Avenue.

Many students have clamored for more entertainment options downtown, Schumacher Cohen said. The city has slowly responded, with the restoration and reopening of the Leonard Theater on Adams Avenue. The Lackawanna Heritage Valley has a long-term plan to transform the massive stone Iron Furnaces location into an entertainment venue similar to the SteelStacks in Bethlehem.

Some would like to see more walkable green spaces downtown. One of the first questions young families looking for places to live is, “Where is the playground?” Rich said with a chuckle.

“You’re not going to buy a house or live someplace where you have to get in the car to take your kid to the park,” said Rich, who has a 6-year-old daughter.

The city has made much progress in revitalizing itself, but the empty storefronts serve as a nagging reminder of the city’s economic decline and the difficulty in coming back. Alexiou suggests moving many of the stores in the Marketplace at Steamtown into those spaces, and converting the cavernous mall into office space.

No matter what the city does to continue its downtown restoration, the most important thing is to use a lot of different ingredients in the recipe.

“If it has something of everything, then it’s a normal neighborhood. It’s going to be one that’s useful to people,” Rich said. “I think that’s what Scranton needs.”

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